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Boom Goes the Novel

Will the economic bust be good for the novel? The social critic Walter Benn Michaels certainly seems to think so.

Michaels, a professor of English at the University of Illinois at Chicago and the author of “The Trouble With Diversity,” definitely doesn’t think much of the main thrust of American fiction since the Reagan Revolution. As the nation began its long march toward “market triumphalism,” he writes in a provocative essay in the latest issue of Bookforum, the novel turned away from critiquing the predations of the market and toward the consolations of history.

Case in point: Toni Morrison’s “Beloved” (1987) — voted the best work of American fiction of the previous 25 years in a 2006 survey by the Book Review — which “effectively” told us that “our problem is lingering racism, not burgeoning capitalism.”

While we were busy reading about slavery, the Holocaust and other feel-good-while-feeling-bad subjects, Michael argues, inequality shot up. In 1987, when “Beloved” appeared, the top 10 percent of the American population made about 38 percent of the national income, while the bottom fifth made roughly 3.8%. By 2006, the top 10 percent was grabbing nearly half of all the money.

“For a great many Americans,” Michaels declares, “the boom has been the problem, not the crash.” Well, thank God that’s over.

To me, that sounds like something only a guy with lifetime tenure could say. And I’d be surprised if anyone on the unemployment line is raging against the outsized bonuses collected by the scouts for Oprah’s Book Club. But Michaels’s other big claim — that Bret Easton Ellis’s “American Psycho” is a more important novel than “Beloved,” Philip Roth’s “Plot Against America” or any other “historicist work” — is more interesting to contemplate.

While Morrison and Roth were “pandering” to “the upper middle class’s sense of its virtue,” Ellis was “problematizing” it, Michaels writes. “You get a better sense of the actual structure of American society from any of Ellis’s famous descriptions of what people are wearing (‘a suit by Lubiam, a great-looking striped spread-collar cotton shirt from Burberry, a silk tie by Resikeio and a belt from Ralph Lauren’) than you do from all the accounts of people reclaiming, refusing, or repurposing their cultural identities.”

Tom Wolfe made a similar argument from the other side of the political spectrum about 20 years ago. But let’s not get distracted by history, people! Here’s a memo to aspiring serious novelists: From now on, please, no more books set in decades when people still wore hats!

(Want to know more? Go hear Michaels, Dale Peck and David Simon, the creator of “The Wire,” discuss “Fiction in the Age of Inequality” at the New York Public Library on April 14 at 7 p.m. Don’t panic! Michaels thinks it’s O.K. to love “The Wire,” even if you “had to pay the HBO subscription fee to watch it.”)

As a practical matter, if the bottom 20% of earners are busy working two jobs to make less money, 20% of potential readers have less money to buy books as well as less time to read them. That audience is twice as large as the top 10% who can afford books in pretty much any economy.

The other problem with a lot of recent American fiction is this: it sucks.

Michaels is totally wrong about Roth and “The Plot Against America.” Roth’s alternative history came out in 2004, halfway through Dubya’s reign of error. Roth’s treatment of Republican politics in his imagined 1940s clearly is meant as commentary on the right-wing ascendancy of the past decade. If Michaels missed the contemporary relevance, then he’s not much of a literary critic. But then I tend to think poorly of critics who use the ugly neologism “problematize.” As for Easton Ellis, puhleeze. If Michaels is looking for contemporary fiction that does deal with the world we live in, and with the depredations of the market and its social consequences, he need look no farther than Richard Price, especially his recent “Lush Life.”

Professors like this make people not want study literature. As if the goal of literature should be either race-based or class-based social criticism! How dreary! This is an entirely typical, leftist, pseudo-Marxist academic squabbling with also entirely typical, leftist, identity politics obsessed academics. Who cares! Complaining about racism and complaining about inequality don’t have anything to do with good literature, except by coincidence.

How is “Beloved” not as much about class as it is about race? Michaels’ is certainly right that there are lots of important novelists who go unread these days in the university–Theodore Dreiser, for one–who have much to say to our times. Another one, is Booth Tarkington. How many American Lit Ph’d’s, I wonder, have ever read his “Growth” Trilogy. I am willing to be maybe 1%. Walter, have your read it? But, Michaels has always been keen at catching the wave of the latest academic market forces. One never feels when reading him that his views are deeply held; just good for business.

Ellis’s “American Psycho” is screamingly funny. I finally got around to reading it last fall, quite independently of the events on Wall Street, but Wall Street’s implosion certainly made “American Psycho” all the more relevant. While it is hilarious as a critique of the 80s, it also applies to current high-finance types and the conspicuous consumption of ordinary Americans as well.

I may get around to reading Morrison and Roth some day, but I’d much rather read Richard Powers and David Foster Wallace, and European novelists like Kazuo Ishiguro and Milan Kundera. Perhaps too many American writers are still trying to write “the great American novel” while everyone else is trying to write great International novels.

I am interested to look more into it but as far as I can see Michael’s claims are absolutely bizarre. I cannot imagine how he would come to believe that Beloved isn’t about inequality. I also find it very offensive that he would “effectively” discount “people reclaiming, refusing, or repurposing their cultural identities.” One wonders whether he has any sense in what happened in America’s history at all.
I, personally think that Beloved is an incredibly important novel and an essential part of the U.S. identity. I have already read it but recently acquired it as an audio book from //www.audiobooks.net/audiobooks_buy.php?searchTitle=&searchAuthor=morrison&searchKeyword=&expanded=0&sortBy=popularity&media=both&abridged=both&genre=%25&subgenre=%25 and was just enjoying its magnificence again. I really think that more Americans should read it.

Argh! Is there anything more ridiculous than commenters commenting on a blog about books who are either incapable or too incurious to read? To those of you who helpfully promoted The Wire or suggested Walters check out Richard Price (a writer for The Wire): Michaels knows and agrees with you. From the article in question: “And you get an even better sense [better than American Psycho that is] of [the actual structure of American society] from something that’s not a novel at all, the TV series The Wire, the most serious and ambitious fictional narrative of the twenty-first century so far.”

To Ms. Schuessler: I hope you’ll actually engage with what is a compelling argument next time, rather than deliver non-sequiturs about Oprah’s book scouts.